The key goal of the paper where to understand the Norwegian gender representation law. We went through substantial effort to collect the necessary data to only investigate one side of the law. To allow other researchers to build on our work, we have made the data used for this research project available.

This work has taken up quite a bit of our time on the side of our main projects. Please cite the paper if you use the data.

Seierstad, C., Opsahl, T. (2011). For the few not the many? The effects of affirmative action on presence, prominence, and social capital of female directors in Norway. Scandinavian Journal of Management 27 (1), 44-54

The companies studied

We collected a list of all the 384 public limited companies in Norway (Allmennaksjeselskap or ASA) that were available online through the Norwegian Business Register on August 5, 2009. We chose these companies as they are the ones bound by the gender representation law. The companies-file contains the list of companies with the following columns:

An identifier that we assigned to each company

The organisation number

The full name

The registered postcode and city

People included in our study

Based on the companies' boards of directors, we extracted a list with the names of all the directors. From this list, we excluded employee representatives as the legislation does not affect them in the same way. Since mistakes could have occurred while entering the data and people can change their name, this list was manually cleaned by studying the compositions over time and comparing the changes. For example, Alexandra Bech Gjørv has been a director of Schibsted ASA from 2001 until 2007. However, in 2001 and 2002, her name was listed as simply Alexandra Bech. Without the manual cleaning, she would have been included as two people in the dataset.

To determine the sex of the directors in our dataset, we collected lists of all male and all female first names belonging to more than 200 people in Norway from Statistics Norway. We cross-referenced these two lists with the first names of the directors. However, some first names were not in either of the lists, and some first names were included in both lists. In an effort to avoid having missing data, we conducted a web search to determine the gender of directors with these names.

The people-file contains the list of directors with the following columns:

An identifier that we assigned to each individual

The full name

The gender

Relational data

For each month from May 2002, we have the affiliation of directors to boards (two-mode network) and the inter-personal network among directors (one-mode network). The two-mode network files is a list of affilitations with the company identifier that we assigned first and then the individual identified. Similarly, the inter-personal network files is a list of ties between individuals.